


Too Light To Be Culture

by millenomi



Category: Heaven Will Be Mine (Visual Novel)
Genre: Gen, Other, Panic Attacks, Rejection, Transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-06-30 22:33:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15761070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/millenomi/pseuds/millenomi
Summary: At the edge of space-Culture-time, as it all begins, there are people no one sees. This is one of them.





	Too Light To Be Culture

**Author's Note:**

> ⚠️ _This story contains depictions of internalized transphobia and rejection sensitivity, and of a panic attack caused by them. This story is set in the narrative line of[Heaven Will Be Mine](https://pillowfight.itch.io/heaven-will-be-mine)._

# (HEAVEN WILL BE MINE): TOO LIGHT TO BE CULTURE

The transport is uneventful and you look outward through the window, made of little pieces that fit together barely, like broken glass in the shape of a mirror, and what you see outside shifts in ways you’re not sure you want to understand.

You feel alone. Your seatmate — she shifted several times during the flight, uneasy and clearly sick. The lack of Culture this far from humanity feels like the surface of your self comes undone. You don’t really care. You somehow know that sensation and you don’t even care why. You can withstand anything. Really, you are safe. Even during hardship, nothing can really touch you.

The transport lands. You are herded out, noticing the nervous giggling of the other kids. You sit through orientation. The Academy is small, a lot smaller than it looks like from the outside — too busy building an environment for humanity to survive in to build an environment for humanity to thrive in. The dorms are cramped, and your room is small. You don’t need much space. You don’t mind.

You don’t mind.

* * *

The night of the prelims you’re heartbroken and no one will talk to you. (Not that they do. No one has reached out ever since you arrived, quiet in the last few rows of every lecture, in the sim in the far corner at every lab. But your disheveled appearance, the tears, they must not be helping right now.)

You look at your results and are heartbroken. Sim stability rate, tidal microresonance, reflex assessment — you keep looking at your levels and at the other ones, the tacks marked `PILOTING-MINIMUM`, very, very far above. Just a few of yours come close to that line. Tidal-force projection. Your theory scores. Culture in-processing. That’s fine. You’re just a fucking nerd. No one is sending you home. You’re still useful to them. That’s fine. That’s fine.

You look at the results of your class, a rainbow of different colors, all clustered closer to `PILOTING-MINIMUM`. Or past. Your heart breaks again. You look at your class. Some are talking. They’re so pretty, they’re so cute — did they touch — _oh_.

You blush. The corner of the cafeteria the results are posted in suddenly seems not private enough of a space. Not safe enough of a space. You don’t need much more than a corner, but as the students show affection, you suddenly know that this here space is not for you.

You leave, more hurriedly than you’d like. They must’ve seen you, but you tell yourself they haven’t, because you don’t want to disturb them.

No one is sending you away. You’re fine. You’re fine.

* * *

In space-Culture-time, everything has a trajectory.

They say that trajectory can be calculated with incredible confidence. But the secret they tell pilots is that that can happen only if you can know all the factors that affect it. The secret they tell pilots is that they have to understand that the trajectories they have aren’t well-defined. They don’t have all the factors. They must make choices and their training is there to make sure they make informed choices.

You can’t really die in a ship-self, but it doesn’t mean you can’t get hurt.

You know these secrets because they’re telling you in pilot class. You’re not a pilot and you’ll never be, but you’ve been put on a research subtract — low-aid tidal projection testing. And that means that you need to know how to move in space, even though the research vessel is not a Ship-Self and is barely a lifeboat.

You look at the pilots-to-be and your heart is full of a feeling you don’t want to describe. Describing makes it real. Giving it a word means attaching a meaning to it; attaching a meaning means connecting it to wider Culture; and the weigh of Earth culture is still too much for you to process that feeling in any way you feel you’d be expected to.

So you hold it in. You can withstand anything.

Some of the pilots have changed their pronouns months ago. A few are becoming more feminine by the day. You feel a different feeling looking at them. You feel a little trapped, you feel a little elated.

You don’t connect what this makes you feel to what weighs in your heart. Some part of you knows that a lot of your sanity, a lot of the way your soul currently holds together, depends on not being able to.

* * *

“You’re doing fine. Raise the calib. Six up, six up.” 

Dia is on the other side of coms. You’re holding onto the steel frame of the research vessel. If someone from Earth looked at you, they would think it very similar to a motorbike, if it extended into weird curves that flowed into an ovoid pod all around you. Some of those curves hurt your eyes when calibration makes them vibrate. That’s normal. You hold onto the driving setup and push it slightly to align the outer prongs to the mass driver. One up, three, five up— six up.

“Six up confirmed, Dia. I read alignment in green.” (You hate your voice. You don’t talk much.)

“I read you in green as well, Ani. Are you ok?”

You smirk. “All’s fine.” You can withstand anything.

“I just— stressor indexes are high.”

“This research is important. I can’t mess it up.”

“You won’t mess it up. You’re top of the class, Ani, seriously.”

She’s wrong, of course. Piloting is top of the class. Right now, you are deeply aware, pilots are undergoing sync testing into the vacuum sim chambers, the first step for determining potential Ship-Self association. You know because your schedules align by necessity; you take all the same classes. You know because you want with all your soul to be _like them_.

You put these words back down where they should be.

“How are we for launch?”

“You want to ride?”, asks Dia.

“A little.”

“Airspace is ours until eighteen hundred hours.” (Even here, Earth time, Earth culture, reaches — and you suddenly hate it. You hate it with a fire you don’t understand, as if a dam was broken open. You don’t want to be _like what you left_. You want to be _like what you could be_. But you can’t be a pilot. You can’t be a girl, with their innate piloting aptitude you’d otherwise have. You can’t—)

You flick a switch. “Seven seven six, test flight eight twenty one freeform confined to airspace C, please confirm.”

“Confirmed—”, says Dia, with the tone of a person who knew she shouldn’t have bothered to. You’ve already pushed the button.

The mass driver hums as it ejects you. You look at the lights of the tunnel flicking past one after the other with impossible speed as the autonomous picojet takes over underneath you. In space-Culture-time, everything has a trajectory, and yours is a delicate curve that splits the thin glass of void into two parts, two shards of that whole that cannot stop you, whether its pressure be too damned high or too insufferably low. And for a time you are that ovoid pod, and you are that trajectory, and you slice through that crack, and everything is fine.

* * *

You’re crying on the floor. Dia is with you.

(She’s been with you for a long while. She’s the only one in class who talks to you, really. Everyone is cordial, but everyone is also afraid of you, and you don’t really understand why, though you will.)

“What happened now?”

You don’t want to tell her what happened.

“I saw—”

You aren’t telling her what happened.

“It’s just—”

“Are you hurt?”

It hurts all over.

“A panic attack.”

It’s true.

“They—”

Dia kneels beside you. Quieter. “They’re not bullying you, are they?”

No. “No.” No. They’re perfect. “They. They’re fine.” You see them flirt and it breaks your heart and you don’t understand why. “I don’t get why I’m.”

Dia is listening. She’s always been better than you, too. Her full tidal sensitivity. You know she can read the narration in your heart. Or at least you suspect. You can’t. You can _project_ — that’s the only thing you’re good at. And you feel yourself projecting this, spilling. Perhaps that’s why the pilots don’t want you around. (No one wants you around.) You project without wanting to.

Dia looks at you.

“In space— In space, culture isn’t as heavy. Tell me, Ani — if you could change your shape, what would it be?”

“A lot more feminine— _oh._ ”

It came out without thinking. And you immediately feel a lot, a lot better.

* * *

In space-Culture-time, everything has a trajectory. The trick is that you can’t see all the factors that influence it. For pilots, especially when you can do the math differently, figuring out one that works is always, always, in the end, a work of wits and, more importantly, faith.

* * *

“Raise it up.”

“Ana, are you sure?” Dia on the radio seems worried. You’re more assured, now, a lot more sure of yourself, even though the buzzing is still there, just more distant. “This isn’t a joyride. If you turn on projection detector — this is full flight in median airspace. You’ll need override.”

“Well, we have been postponing this forever, and honestly, conditions are the best they’ve been in months today.” Tidal pressure is at its lowest — a ride around outer Academy space with the personal projector will show you exactly how far you can extend your self and your authority in those extreme conditions without needing a full Ship-Self around you.

You input your mission plan. It’s improvised, but here — even if you can’t pilot — if you can just fly a little, you’re happy. You weave that into the words you type, into your posture. You see yourself in the monitor loopback. You’re— not yet there, but so, so much cuter.

Words flash on the screen: “Researcher-cadet Ananke is authorized for projection experiment seven through Iapetus override.” You smile.

You have this.

You hold tight onto the driving setup and begin projection. You can’t feel the feedback but you see space around you become more you, more in tune. Even your face on the loopback seems a little softer now. You look forward and push the mass driver command and:

_launch_

into an arc that is a painter’s signature, sure-handed and graceful. You cut through Culture. You’re neither, you’re both, you’re Other, and it’s on some level fine with you even when it isn’t on another. And whatever you are, you’re leaving a trail of you. On some level you know you’re doing this for the pilots — they will never see you. Heck, they won’t remember you. But they may see this, perhaps, the glide you describe around and outside the Academy (your body starts feeling light, very light) that flows now rather than cut.

On some level you yearn still, but on another, you’re really doing all this stuff really _for_ yourself, for the first time in your life. Not _to_ yourself. To be, rather than to escape.

You feel your own gravity push you forward. Weaker, now that your lonely mass has to sustain the whole apparatus without aid from the Academy. It is heavier, and you have learned that sometimes you can’t really withstand it all.

You will learn it very soon.

You have learned it long ago.

When you bend yourself so much that time confuses itself, that space confuses itself, consequence and memory become artifacts, like compression grain in a video — indistinct and often inconsequential.

You haven’t felt your body in a long, long time. You aren’t feeling it now. You’re about not to feel it. Other sensations don’t stop as cleanly. Flashes of sight. On the monitor before you, the experimental research group logo — `EX NECESSITATE VIRTUS` — flashes briefly as the outer hull collapses in. You project gravity out to keep it in place. Dia is about to scream in your radio, and that’s okay, that’s fine. She will scream, and then she won’t, and in a year she’ll be okay. You were just a friend. You can see that trajectory now, clearer, better.

In the moment, though, as the projection implodes and the lack of gravity finally reaches in and through your physical representation, as it peels you layer after layer while you desperately try to project, you remember your scores and how silly they were. How they were truthful — you would never be a pilot, after all — and, in the end, utterly inconsequential.

You see Iapetus. You can finally see inside of him, his story, and it is the most boring story anyone has ever told you. You see what he wants to do; you see why he allowed the override for your flight. Too late, too late. You see inside the pilots, unreachable forever now, and you wish you could fall suddenly out of your infatuation with them, but it is tempered now that in this compressed moment you see precisely through them. They will hear. Some will care. You were right: all will forget.

You see inside Dia, and project one single forceful thought:

“I’m sorry.”

and then your body is torn apart and you vanish.

* * *

Then you wait for a long, long time.

* * *
    
    
      From: [ambient tidal forces]
    Subject: A forbiddance
    
    I don't even know how to talk to you. Do you like art? Do you even think what you do is art? I've been looking at you from afar. I wanted to be with you. Or like you. Or you. But now I don't know anymore. What part is the me I wanted to be? What part is the you I wanted to imitate? Do we even care? I don't think you'll know. I think I have forbidden myself from talking to you. I don't even know what I'm saying. What I want. At the end of things, our fractals repeat ourselves and our situations endlessly. People are always people, there's little escaping from it. Even when they're no longer people. I want to make a line happen. I want it to be bright and bring my heart out. So it can be seen properly. So that my thinking becomes obsolete. Lost. Unneeded. 
    Not that you care.
    

* * *

It’s breezy on Earth. All parts of the planet are surveilled now, with what’s happening in space, but you don’t quite register as having enough intent to be a threat. Intent is a funny thing when what gives you sentience is gone, particles in orbit around ruins. What you didn’t expect, though, is the strength of gravity here to be such that it doesn’t just pull you into the well, but also compress you again until it gives you form.

You work on it until it isn’t fuzzy anymore. It— the gravity can shape you but it can’t hold you. You can go back, if you want, up in the sky, among the pilots you have admired.

And it hurts again now, with the first heartbeat of your new form, now that you think of it. But it will pass.

Maybe they will see you now. Soon. Sometimes, in the future, they have. Time, and space, and Culture aren’t quite the same for you anymore, and at times you get lost in them forwards and backwards, and the strip around the Academy where you previous body used to be still gives chills to any pilot that happens to pass through it. But before they can know, those chills are gone.

Maybe, now, in the here-and-now, you can be seen for yourself, no matter how angry/lost/fascinated they make you.

You start making your way out of the forest.

A city is nearby.


End file.
